From Clutter to Compassion

Client

Tools

Date

Services

Figma, Figjam, Miro, Canva, Slack

St Vincent De Paul (Case Study)

Vinnies is known for their community support via donations. They face a challenge with fast fashion donations and are concerned with the environmental impacts that are associated.

However, this presents an opportunity for them to educate and promote better quality contributions to amplify sales while addressing environmental concerns.

6 Nov - 2 Dec 2023

UX design, UI design

Understanding the Market

Vinnies hosts a wealth of content however information is densely organised with indistinguishable designs for varying topics, making it difficult to digest. 

We looked at other prominent players in the charity sector e.g. Salvo Stores, Red Cross, Savers and Lifeblood who also strive to make a positive impact through their initiatives in order to gain a better understanding of best practice in the charity industry.

We placed our analysis of each company into a table of pluses and deltas to see where Vinnies can improve in terms of UI and

Comparing the Vinnies website to it’s competitors gave us some useful insights into how information can be presented in a more digestible and engaging way.

Let’s Compare

Vinnies Website

  • Most pages are formatted as above with many sections of information that look the same - can be difficult to distinguish and time consuming to read through

  • Unable to tell that there are actually secondary menus that appear as a dropdown when clicking on ‘Find help‘, ‘Get involved‘, or ‘Advocacy‘

  • Difficult to tell what can be donated unless clicking through to different pages - Donate —> scroll to donate goods —> open faq accordion

Lifeblood Website

  • Information is organised in clear and distinguishable sections with the use of high-res images

  • Information about what you can donate is placed high on the home page and clearly displayed

Red Cross

  • Red Cross provides tips for decluttering and instructions for donating are laid out clearly

  • Information clearly displayed with informative copy

  • UI can be improved, e.g. buttons to fill the bottom of the frame

Mapping Our Assumptions

Now that we were aware of the gaps, we mapped our assumptions of what users may think when visiting the Vinnies website.

The main ‘important unknowns’ that we wanted to focus our research on were:

  1. People don’t know how their donations benefit others

  2. People want to be educated on the benefits of donating

  3. People don’t know what they can donate

Finding the Truth - Research Plan

To test our assumptions, we needed:

  • To understand how people donate items, when, to whom and why

  • To understand second hand purchasing habits

  • To discover frustrations of donating or purchasing second hand

We interviewed 17 people who have donated or purchased second hand goods to gain a deeper understanding of their behaviours.

Main Reasons for Donating - Research Findings

1. Declutter

2. Help others

Other Research Insights

Our research also highlighted some negative perceptions of charities or a reluctance in understanding potential effects of donations:

  1. Doesn’t trust big charities

  2. Doesn’t research before donating

  3. Doesn’t track the impact of donations

  4. Doesn’t communicate with charities

These findings validated our assumptions that people want to know the benefits of donating, however we now see that the reasons for inaction may be due to a lack of trust.

Straight to the Source - Contextual Inquiries

We conducted contextual inquiries at 3 Vinnies stores and 1 local charity shop to understand:

  • How charities operate and support communities

  • How the business makes decisions around donations and selling

Key Insights

We spoke to a total of 4 workers and were advised that a majority of store workers are volunteers, many of who are retired.

They also provided the following useful insights:

  1. People often complained about the cost of the items for sale - indicating lack of knowledge of charity operations

  2. Most people are only educated about Vinnie’s initiatives through in-store signage

So our solution needs to…

  • Be a straightforward process - enough for elder Vinnies staff to grasp

  • Have some sort of educational component about Vinnies’ community impact to educate users other than store signage

Empathy Mapping

We began to map out some experiences that our persona may face during the donation process to gain a better understanding of who our persona might be.

Key Insights

  • Say: I want to know more about how my donations are processed

  • Think: What happens to my donations?

  • Does: Donates when needing to declutter

  • Feel: I would like to know more about the impact of my donations

Clare - The Indiscriminate Donor

To declutter seasonally by donating her unwanted items to her nearest charity

GOAL

NEED

She wants to help others by donating and needs to know how her donations impact others

She is frustrated by a lack of transparency from charities regarding the impact of donations

PAINT POINTS

We were happy with our persona as she represented all the fundamental behaviours that came from our research. However creating a problem statement presented challenges for our team.

Problems on problems

“How do you even measure trust?”

We came up with 10 problem statements and the statements that we agreed on mostly concerned charity trust and reassurance.

But we found ourselves asking…

As trust is largely subjective, we decided to put this concept on hold as it would require much more time and research to truly understand and measure.

We decided to go back to our fundamental findings of people donating to declutter and help others which lead to our final problem statement:

Clare needs to know how charities use her donations because she wants to help others by donating unwanted items

How Might We…

The two HMWs we thought best addressed our problem statement were:

1. HMW motivate Clare to be less apathetic about donating

2. HMW inform Clare how charities use her donations to impact others

Ideation

We proceeded with two rounds of ideation with Crazy 8’s with both HMWs to see what was more viable

When we ideated on our first HMW we noticed apathy was not true to our persona and problem statement.

Clare is fundamentally concerned about the impact and wants to help others with her donations

Round 1

HMW motivate Clare to be less apathetic about donating

DISQUALIFIED

Our second HMW was more relevant to our persona because Clare is someone who indeed wants to help people with her donations.

Round 2

HMW inform Clare about how charities use her donations to impact others?

WINNER

Ideation blend

We held 3 rounds of ideation and after voting on our most viable ideas, we decided to use a combination of:

  1. QR code scan to register an account and receive notifications about community or store needs e.g. supplies

  2. Offer opportunities to donate to specific causes

  3. Tracking of donations

Drawing It Out

We decided that our product will be a web-app in order to be:

  1. Cost effective

  2. Time effective (users won’t have to go through process of downloading app or entering through a different website)

We drew out the flow to gain a better understanding of the user’s experience.

User Journey:

  1. Scan QR code in store to open web-app

  2. Create account/log in

  3. Scan a 2nd QR code on counter to collect 50 points for donating

  4. 25 points is allocated to Vinnies for store needs

  5. Other 25 points for donor to allocate to chosen causes within 48 hours - indicated by countdown timer for urgency

  6. View donation history

Issue 1: We imagined people scanning 50 points into their account, then seeing that they can only allocate 25 points would be a confusing process

Solution 1: Added fund allocation pie chart for transparency as an alternative to splitting points

Issue 2: 50 points per donation didn’t seem like a substantial number and was difficult to divide between causes

Solution 2: Set default donation points to 100

Putting it to the Test

I implemented the proposed changes from our sketches and we tested our first low fidelity prototype.

Usability test plan

Goal: to find out how participants would create an account and apply points earned in store

Logistics: unmoderated, in-person or video call interviews



Participants: people who are frequently donating in general and people that are donating to charities

Tasks: create an account, then allocate all points using the My Vinnie’s web-app

Metrics to measure

Quantitative:

  • The time it takes users to create a My Vinnies account and allocate 25 points to each cause

  • Error rate

Qualitative:

  • understand the user’s experience through a series of follow up questions

Results

Avg. Time to complete: 2min 35sec

Error rate: 33%

Pain point 1: Users felt confused around login process

Solution: Changed to ‘create account’ to emulate a first time customer experience instead

Pain point 2: : Donations page - “300 points” was written as an example to show a user has made previous donations. This, coupled with the title “your donations have earned” sounded like the 300 points were accrued from the recent scanned-in items at the beginning of the usability test

Solution: Clarified that the points on the Donations page is a total of all earned points with the title “My Vinnies Points History”

I implemented the necessary changes from our previous usability test. Using the same plan and metrics, we carried out another usability test with the iterated prototype.

Testing Again

Results

Avg. Time to complete: 2min 15sec

Error rate: 8%

Pain point 1: Users felt there should be an introduction to the app as they were not sure what to expect when creating an account

Solution: Created an onboarding pop-up with introduction once ‘Create Account’ is clicked

Pain point 2: : Users felt there should be more information about My Vinnies at the stores

Solution: Although this could be perceived as personal opinion, we proceeded with the idea of adding signage and placing the QR code on it as this aligned with our:

  • Stakeholder research: Vinnies customers are usually only educated about initiatives from store signage

  • Persona behaviours: Clare chooses the most convenient way to donate and being able to scan the QR code straight away and save her time in the donation process

Branding Guidelines

  • A design system was created for the team to adhere to in our final prototype.

  • We kept the iconic blue and yellow Vinnies colour scheme to stay consistent with the brand. We also kept the typography simple and language informal to connect with our user.

  • The name MyVinnies stuck as we felt it was simple and created a connection between donors and Vinnies as a brand.

  • This design system extended into our store signage for a cohesive omni-channel experience.

Final Prototype

Our aim: We wanted to help Vinnies achieve their goal of educating people about their community initiatives and encourage the donation of higher quality items. To achieve this, we wanted to empower users by engaging them in the donation process, while simultaneously helping Vinnies to promote awareness about their causes.

How did we accomplish this?

Provided users with a sense of accomplishment through encouraging language and ability to earn points from donations

Our market research indicated that Vinnies website format is cluttered and important information is hard to locate 

We showcased educational content that is relevant to the user in a digestible format

Empowered users to take ownership in the donation process by showing tangible results of their donations and allowing them to track the causes they contributed to

Users can also share their progress and their donations via a social sharing button to encourage others to donate

What Next?

Building Trust

  • There is opportunity to increase donations or sales through building trust

  • This could be achieved through more rounds of user research to gain insights of what trust means to them and the true reasons for lack of trust

Measure Success

  • Measure the number of My Vinnies accounts created, frequency of donations and the number of causes that donation points were allocated to through the web app

  • Measure the revenue generated from donations that are registered through the My Vinnies web app

  • Gauge user satisfaction of the points allocation and tracking process through website ratings and feedback request

Looking Back

As a group, we embraced transparent communication and encouraged collaboration with each decision. All members were encouraging and thought about every angle to ensure each decision aligned with the project brief and with our research.

Key Learnings

  • A democratic approach to decision making fosters trust within the team for members to feel heard before a final decision is made

  • Creating a timeline with space for ample user research was imperative for us to gain deeper insights and synthesise our findings without rushing

  • Having a diverse team with varying expertise will be a benefit for leveraging each skill in the process